Abstract
The ongoing evolution of the power system to implement climate action policies is resulting in a continuous increase in the penetration of renewables and the necessity of strengthening the transmission grid to optimize the usage of those sources and contain operation costs. Reinforcing the transmission lines or building new ones is a process that is made difficult due to authorization issues related with environmental and public acceptance concerns. Developing innovative conductors for overhead lines with enhanced performances with respect to the traditional ones would bring benefits in terms of energy efficiency increases in transmission and distribution grids without requiring the substitution of the existing towers. The project CALAJOULE (the genesis of the acronym comes from the union of the Italian verb “calare”-to decrease-to the third person singular, namely “cala” i.e., decreases, and of Joule, obvious reference to the active losses), cofinanced by the Italian Ministry of Economic Development in the framework of the “Ricerca di Sistema” program, aims at proposing innovative solutions for overhead line conductors for the containment of Joule power losses. In this paper, starting from the state-of-the-art of the currently adopted conductors, the main innovative solutions resulting from the project are presented and compared with the traditional ones to evaluate the achievable reduction in Joule losses.
Highlights
In recent decades, the growth and economic development of some countries has resulted in a stimulus, and an increase in consumption; among these is the increase in the demand for electricity
The climate action plans worldwide are demanding for an evolution of the electricity sector, in order to contain the emissions of greenhouse gas (GHG), improve the energy efficiency and increase the share of renewables in the electricity production
The above-mentioned climate action policies are resulting in an evolution of the generation park, with the gradual substitution of traditional fossil-fuelled power plants with a high number of smaller generators, the majority of which are connected to the distribution network
Summary
The growth and economic development of some countries has resulted in a stimulus, and an increase in consumption; among these is the increase in the demand for electricity. The reduction of Joule losses in the power system, both at transmission and distribution levels, plays a key role in increasing energy efficiency, with obvious advantages for the power system both in economic terms and in terms of reducing carbon dioxide emission into the atmosphere This framework is extremely large, given the large extension of the power supply system and the different peculiarities of the EHV-HV and MV-LV networks. A procedure for the evaluation of the impact of substituting the traditional conductors with the proposed new ones is fully developed and presented, showing the potential results in containment of Joule power losses, in cost savings and in CO2 emission avoidance Such approach allows quantitatively evaluating the positive economic and environmental impacts for paradigmatic overhead lines. This topic is well covered in technical literature in international working groups and standards [22,23,24,25,26,27,28]
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